A long time ago, in a data center far, far away, IT administrators were promised that “this would be the year of VDI.” We heard that for about fifteen years running. It became something of an industry joke — the kind of punchline that got knowing laughs at trade shows and sparked eye-rolls from anyone who had ever tried to sell a Citrix deployment to a skeptical CFO.
Well, the joke’s over. And nobody made that clearer than the crew at NerdioCon 2026.
I’m in Palm Springs this week for Nerdio’s fifth annual user conference, and I have to say — the event has come a long way. When co-founders Vadim Vladimirskiy and Joseph Landes first dreamed up the concept of a Nerdio conference, they had a little over 100 people in a hotel ballroom in Cancun, Mexico. This year? Nearly 1,000 attendees from 22 countries descended on the La Quinta Resort & Club in Palm Springs, California. The Star Wars-themed “IT Leader Strikes Back” motif ran through everything — lightsabers in the audience, Star Wars intro-style video bumpers, Vadim doing a surprisingly good Yoda impression — and honestly, it worked. It set a tone that was equal parts fun and genuinely charged with momentum.
I had the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with Vadim before the keynote, and then spent the better part of the morning watching the main stage presentation with Vadim, Joseph, newly appointed Chief Product and Technology Officer Scott Manchester, and Senior Director of Product Management (R&D) Christiaan Brinkhoff. It’s only day one, and I’ve already learned a lot. And if you read between the lines a little, I’ve learned what Nerdio is clearly building toward.
An Exclusive Conversation with Vadim: The View from the Top
Before the house lights dimmed and the Star Wars theme blared through the ballroom, I grabbed some time with Vadim Vladimirskiy. We didn’t have a ton of time, but Vadim is the kind of person who gets right to the point, and provides others with exactly what they need to know.
Where Does Nerdio Actually Stand Right Now?
The numbers are impressive. Nerdio has hit $100 million ARR, carries a $1.2 billion valuation, and has been on a global expansion tear. But what I wanted to know was less about where they’ve been and more about what chapter comes next.
“We’re living through a very unique moment,” Vadim told me. “The entire market is shifting from legacy VDI — legacy vendor VDI — to a more modern Windows Cloud environment. And the opportunity is here right now. It’s not something we’re anticipating. It’s going on this moment.”
That framing — the Great Migration — became the throughline of the entire day. Vadim wasn’t talking about some vague future state. He was describing something he sees happening in real time, with real customers, across thousands of deployments. The number of seats, the number of organizations making this transition over the next two to four years? Basically the entire addressable market. That’s not a small thing.
His vision for what Nerdio becomes in that context is also worth noting. Not just an Azure Virtual Desktop management tool. Not just a Windows 365 platform. Vadim described Nerdio as a unified EUC management platform — one that covers Cloud PCs, AVD, Intune-managed local Windows devices, mobile, and anything else that falls under the end user computing umbrella. “Whatever is EUC-related,” he said simply. The goal is for customers to never have to wonder where a particular workload should live — Nerdio helps them figure that out, and then keeps reassessing as things change.
The Switzerland Angle
Here’s something I’ve been tracking for a while in my conversations with the Nerdio team: how they think about their relationship with Microsoft. On one hand, they’re deeply, foundationally tied to Microsoft’s platform. On the other hand, they can’t just be a Microsoft reskin — that wouldn’t be sustainable, and it wouldn’t be defensible.
When I raised this with Vadim, he was characteristically direct. “Close product and engineering-level alignment is one of our secret weapons,” he said. Knowing what Microsoft is going to build, what they’re not going to build, and how soon they’re likely to get there — that’s how Nerdio avoids building redundant features and instead focuses on extending value. Automation, simplification, broader coverage across the EUC stack. The customer ends up with something more powerful than either company could offer on its own.
“Instead of two companies fighting for the same dollar with redundant functionality,” Vadim explained, “you have two companies teaming up and providing something much more robust.”
The AI Question — Real Signal vs. Background Noise
Every briefing I attend these days has an AI angle. Every single one. So I asked Vadim the version of the question I actually care about: where is AI genuinely moving the needle for Nerdio customers, versus where it’s just noise?
His answer was grounded. Many features in Nerdio’s products are already AI-powered in practical ways. But the more pressing and forward-looking challenge, he said, is governance. “Governing what AI can do within their environments is going to be key.” Technologies like Windows 365 for Agents — which Microsoft announced just days before NerdioCon — give AI agents a sandboxed, contained environment to run workloads on behalf of users. That’s powerful. But organizations that adopt it without a governance layer are leaving themselves exposed. “Helping customers manage the sandboxing of AI in a secure way is definitely something we will be playing a role in.”
He also made a point that I thought was refreshingly honest for a CEO: most agents today are still user-assisted. There’s still a human in the loop. Fully autonomous AI workloads are coming, but they’re not quite here yet. And when they do arrive at scale, knowing what those agents are doing — and having tools to govern them — will matter enormously. That’s the window Nerdio is positioning itself for.
The Keynote: A New Hope for EUC Teams Everywhere
The main stage session was a proper production. Star Wars crawl text, dramatic music, video intros for each presenter, and a room full of IT professionals who were, against all odds, genuinely having fun. But beneath the entertainment was a tightly constructed narrative about where the EUC market is headed and what Nerdio is building to meet it.
The Market Is Shifting — and It’s Not Subtle
Joseph Landes and Vadim opened by laying out the macro picture. Legacy VDI vendors are under pressure from multiple directions at once. Several major players have been taken private by private equity firms, and with that has come aggressive licensing price increases — some described as “triple-digit” growth year over year. Other vendors have been split apart, with bundles customers used to get at reasonable prices now negotiated from two separate vendors.
Then Scott Manchester stepped in with the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Desktop-as-a-Service. If you haven’t seen this chart recently, it’s striking. Microsoft sits in the leaders quadrant at a distance from its nearest competitor that Scott described as larger than anything he’s seen across his 25 years in the industry. And on both axes — current product execution and product vision — the gap is substantial. IDC’s comparable report shows the same picture.
Scott’s “Porsche in the garage” analogy landed particularly well. Most organizations already own the entitlements to Windows Cloud products as part of their existing Microsoft licensing. They’ve been paying for the Porsche this whole time. And many of them are still driving a Datsun B210 — his own first car, he noted, with a grin. The migration story isn’t just about technology. It’s about helping customers realize the value of something they already paid for.
Scott Manchester: The Force Is Strong with This One
Speaking of Scott — his presence at NerdioCon as the new CPTO was one of the headline moments of the event. Joseph Landes called him out by name before bringing him on stage, noting that of everyone they worked with during the years of building Nerdio alongside Microsoft, Manchester was arguably the single most influential person in that relationship.
And his background is not insignificant. Twenty-five years at Microsoft. Key architect behind Azure Virtual Desktop. A central figure in the development of Windows 365. The last major public presentation he gave as a Microsoft employee was at Microsoft Ignite, where his team announced AVD Hybrid support — a feature that, he noted with some satisfaction, most of the organizations in the room already own the entitlements for.
His joining Nerdio isn’t just a talent acquisition story. It’s a statement about what kind of company Nerdio is building itself into. The depth of product knowledge and the continuity of Microsoft engineering relationships that comes with Scott’s background is a genuine differentiator. He also introduced himself with Nerdio-branded shoes that said “Kick DaaS” on them. So he fits in just fine.
Scott’s framework for how Nerdio thinks about its role was the “trusted advisor” model — analogous to a financial planner or family doctor. You want a sustained, data-driven relationship, not a one-time consultation. The more context and history that advisor has about your environment, the better the recommendations they can make. “You want the nerdiest financial planner you can find,” he said. “Well, when you’re thinking about investments in EUC, you want to find the nerdiest people you can.” It’s self-aware, it’s accurate, and honestly, it’s a good pitch.
Product Deep Dive: What’s in NME 7.7, and What’s Coming in 8.0
Yangzi “Z” Zhao, who leads the Enterprise product team at Nerdio, took the demos portion of the keynote — and packed a lot into roughly fifteen minutes.
Migration Tools Are Getting Serious
The foundation of any Great Migration story is the actual ability to move things. Nerdio has been building out its migration capabilities since version 7.5, and version 7.7 is a meaningful step forward. Automated discovery of assigned users, bulk or one-at-a-time migrations between AVD personal and Windows 365 Enterprise, pre-migration snapshots with rollback capability, and the option to move virtual machines to a new Resource Group within the same Azure subscription.
Coming later in H2 2026: support for Windows 365 Flex migrations and cross-tenant support. Both of those have been highly requested, and given the announcement (more on this below) that Microsoft has renamed Windows 365 Frontline to Windows 365 Flex, the timing makes sense.
InTune Policy Studio: Finally, Someone Addressed the Policy Sprawl Problem
If you’ve managed an Intune environment at any real scale, you know the pain point: policy conflicts. Which setting wins when two policies clash? What’s actually being pushed to devices? Where’s the conflict coming from? The Nerdio team built InTune Policy Studio to address exactly this, and it’s shipping with NME 8.0.
The tool lets admins view which settings are configured in any given policy, edit them through an intuitive dashboard interface (not just raw JSON, though the JSON editor is still there if you want it), and submit changes for approval by a second admin before anything goes to production. The conflict detection piece is where it gets particularly useful — you can view policies or pivot to a settings-based view that surfaces conflicts directly and lets you fix them in place. Z described it as the difference between knowing there’s a conflict and actually being able to do something about it from the same screen.
This feature came directly out of Nerdio’s customer advisory board conversations. That “inside-out” development philosophy — build what customers are actually asking for — shows up repeatedly in how the team talks about the product.
InTune Script Management: Versioning for the Rest of Us
Related to the policy work is a new InTune Script Management feature. You can create, edit, version, back up, compare, and restore PowerShell scripts managed through Nerdio — essentially the same governance model the team already built for policies. If you’ve ever deployed a script change and needed to roll it back in a hurry, you’ll understand why this matters.
Global Pools for AVD: Multi-Region, Actually Managed
One of the most architecturally interesting announcements of the day was Global Pools for Azure Virtual Desktop. This is a new Nerdio-managed construct that sits above the existing host pool architecture — grouping multiple host pools across different Azure regions, resource groups, and even subscriptions under a single managed object.
The practical value is significant. Azure regional capacity constraints are a real and growing problem as cloud demand accelerates. Global Pools let NME dynamically assign and reassign users to the optimal host pool within the global pool based on policies the admin defines. You can group pools by region, by image, by subscription — and user assignment can be based on percentage distribution or Entra group membership.
Critically, host pools don’t know they’re part of a Global Pool. Existing features like Auto-Scaling just keep working normally. Scott called it “elegant,” and that’s a fair word for it. Active-passive failover and phased image rollouts across pools are on the near-term roadmap as well.
NME 8.0: A Fresher Face
The UX changes in 8.0 are real and visible. The new three-tier menu drops the default navigation items from 16 down to 7, AVD and Windows 365 are unified under a single “Cloud Desktops” banner, and there’s a new “All Features” page for admins who want everything in one view. Dark mode is confirmed. And Japanese localization is launching with 8.0, with more languages coming at a pace of one to two per release going forward.
A New Licensing Model on the Horizon
Scott closed the product section with an announcement that got considerable attention in the room: a new “Nerdio Managed Cloud Desktop” license model is coming. The impetus is straightforward — as more customers run mixed or evolving deployments spanning AVD, Windows 365, Flex, and other models, they want a single Nerdio license that covers whatever Windows Cloud approach they end up using rather than having to track which Nerdio SKU aligns to which Microsoft product configuration. Details are still being shaped through customer collaboration, but the direction is clear.
Christiaan Brinkhoff and the R&D Team: Welcome to the AI Chapter
If Scott Manchester’s joining was the headline executive hire of the past year, Christiaan Brinkhoff’s arrival as Senior Director of Product Management (R&D) is the one that signals where Nerdio’s product is heading next.
Brinkhoff spent roughly seven to eight years at Microsoft in the Windows Cloud product group. He was involved in the development of foundational Windows 365 features and holds multiple patents from his time there. Scott noted from the stage that several of the AI features Christiaan brought to NerdioCon, he was personally involved in building at Microsoft — which is either a very efficient talent acquisition or a masterclass in continuity. Probably both.
Nerdio Compass: Free Intel for the Citrix-Weary
Compass is a new tool, currently in preview, designed to assess existing Citrix, Omnissa Horizon, and VMware environments and map those workloads to the right Windows Cloud destination. It connects to your existing Citrix environment, initializes and inventories session hosts, delivery controllers, and machine catalogs, and produces a migration path recommendation that maps each workload to AVD, Windows 365 Enterprise, Windows 365 Flex, or the new Windows 365 Cloud Apps offering.
The world map view for multinational organizations is a particularly nice touch — at a glance, you can see where your environments are distributed and what the migration picture looks like globally. Reports are exportable to PDF for the CIO or IT manager conversation.
Here’s the important part: Scott announced from stage that Compass is going to be free for customers currently running Citrix. If you’re in that situation and you want a tool to assess your actual utilization and understand what moving to Windows Cloud would look like — sign up for the preview, no cost involved. You only need a NME license when you’re ready to actually execute the migrations.
Windows 365 for Agents: Nerdio Is Already Building Here
Microsoft launched Windows 365 for Agents in public preview just days before NerdioCon — a purpose-built, IT-governed Cloud PC environment for running AI agents at enterprise scale. The timing was clearly coordinated. Christiaan demo’d Nerdio’s in-progress support for it: creating agent host pools, selecting AI providers, connecting to on-premises networks, choosing golden images, and provisioning applications to agents via App Attach before the agent workflow even starts.
That last piece is worth highlighting. App Attach integration means you can control which applications are available to a given AI agent before it spins up. That’s governance. That’s the “sandboxing” Vadim was describing in our interview earlier in the day — giving AI agents a proper, controlled workspace rather than letting them loose with broad access.
Nerdio will also integrate agent token costs directly into the existing cost analysis dashboards, so you’ll have visibility into what running AI agents actually costs. The longer-term vision includes support for OpenAI Operator and Microsoft AI Foundry alongside Copilot Studio, with monitoring dashboards that show token usage, agent pool utilization, and tool call patterns. This is still early — but the infrastructure Christiaan’s team is building is pointed squarely at being the management layer for enterprise AI workloads, not just traditional desktops.
AI-Enabled Cloud PCs: One Click, Fully Governed
Nerdio is also building support for AI-enabled Cloud PCs — the Cloud PC equivalent of the Copilot+ PC category. The platform surfaces an “AI Status” pane that shows which licenses support AI features, and admins can enable them for individual Cloud PCs or groups with a single click — with all the associated Intune policies automated in the background. Unified dashboards show both AI-enabled Cloud PCs and Copilot+ PCs in one view, with monitoring for how AI policies are performing.
The Partnership Front: More Than Just Microsoft
A key piece of context for everything Nerdio does is that the Microsoft relationship runs deeper than most vendor partnerships in this industry. Four consecutive Microsoft Partner of the Year designations. Engineering-level collaboration going back to the company’s founding. And now Scott Manchester in the CPTO seat, maintaining the team relationships he built over 25 years.
But Nerdio is also expanding its ecosystem in other directions.
The Nutanix Alliance: AVD Goes On-Prem
The Nerdio-Nutanix Strategic Technology Alliance, announced in April 2026, is one of the more strategically interesting moves the company has made. The deal brings Nerdio’s AVD orchestration and automation capabilities to the Nutanix AHV platform, giving organizations that want to run AVD workloads on private cloud infrastructure a single management plane to do it from.
Private preview of Nutanix AHV support is available in NME 7.7 right now. Full image management, App Attach support, and re-image/resize capabilities for Nutanix hosts are coming with 8.0. General availability is targeted for H2 2026. Nutanix executives will be speaking at NerdioCon as well — a signal that this isn’t just a technical integration announcement, it’s a real go-to-market commitment from both sides.
For a lot of organizations, this matters because the migration to AVD doesn’t have to mean going all-cloud if you’re not ready. You can start with AVD on Nutanix infrastructure on-premises and move at your own pace.
Over 300 Enterprise SIs and a Growing Alliance Network
Nerdio now has more than 300 Enterprise systems integrators using NME to deploy and manage AVD, Windows 365, and Intune for enterprise customers worldwide. The Technology Alliance Partner network continues to grow as well, with organizations across the EUC ecosystem building integrations with the platform.
Community, Training, and the “Nerdio University” Ecosystem
This section of the keynote doesn’t get as many headlines as the product announcements, but it’s actually one of the things that makes Nerdio’s position durable. The community they’ve built around Windows Cloud and EUC is active, knowledgeable, and growing.
Nerdio University offers multiple certification tracks that sit well alongside Microsoft’s own certifications. Windows Cloud Workshops run at Microsoft offices around the globe — upcoming stops include Edinburgh, Brisbane, Zurich, Toronto, Detroit, São Paulo, and Sydney. If you want Nerdio to bring a workshop to your city, that’s genuinely an option — reach out to the team.
The broader Nerdio community is free to join and packed with resources: training content, in-person and virtual sessions, best practices, and opportunities to speak at events. Joseph Landes made the point pretty bluntly from the stage: there’s really no reason not to be part of it.
By the Numbers: A Quick Look at Where Nerdio Is in 2026
The scale metrics shared during the keynote are worth capturing in one place:
- 6.5 million+ users now managed across Nerdio products globally
- 23,000+ organizations across the world using at least one Nerdio product
- 10x growth in Windows 365 users under management since last NerdioCon
- 8 product releases of NME in the past twelve months — each with substantive new features
- 4 consecutive years as a Microsoft Partner of the Year honoree
- 5 NerdioCon events completed — from 100 people in Cancun to nearly 1,000 in Palm Springs
What This All Means for IT Leaders
Let me be direct about why any of this matters if you’re an IT professional reading this on a Tuesday afternoon with a help desk queue growing in the background.
The end user computing market is going through a real, fundamental shift right now — not a gradual product lifecycle kind of change, but a relatively compressed window in which the dominant vendors of the last twenty years are losing ground and the Microsoft platform is ascending fast. The organizations that navigate this well will have lower costs, better security posture, and far less infrastructure complexity to manage. The ones that don’t will keep handing over increasingly expensive checks to vendors they know aren’t the right long-term answer.
Nerdio’s value proposition in this moment is clear. They’re the management and automation layer that sits on top of the Microsoft platform, helps you understand where you are today, tells you where you should be, and actually moves things there for you — while keeping the lights on the whole time. The Global Pools feature, the migration tooling, the Compass assessment tool, the InTune Policy Studio — all of it is aimed at making a migration that feels daunting feel manageable.
And on the AI side: the Jedi-level insight here is that the organizations building governance frameworks for AI agents now, while the technology is still in preview and the stakes are relatively contained, are going to be in a much better position when autonomous agent workloads become genuinely widespread. Nerdio and Microsoft are building that governance infrastructure in tandem, and Christiaan Brinkhoff’s R&D team is translating it into something IT administrators can actually deploy and manage.
Scott Manchester said it well from the stage: “You want that nerd in that discipline.” The whole NerdioCon event is, at its core, a gathering of people who genuinely love this stuff — who find real interest in the difference between a multi-session host pool and a Flex licensing model, who get genuinely excited about policy conflict resolution tooling. That’s not accidental. It’s a community that Nerdio has deliberately cultivated, and it’s one of the more defensible competitive advantages they have.
